Morning journal and courier., 1887-03-14
" ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
How He Read the SsEliadn-His Fond
 ness for Shakespeare.

How He Read the SsEIiadn-IHis Fond
 ness for Shakespeare.
 From the Philadelphia Press.l
 I heard new story about Abraham Lin coin. and best of all about Abraham Lin coln's reading, which of all sides of him is perhaps least known. A friend of mine now in the city, who had the good fortune to know Lincoln well for two years before his election as President, says while sitting in his hotel in Bloomington, H.: one early morning thirty years ago, the landlord came up stairs and asked him to come down and be introduced to Abraham Lincoln, known and loved of all landlords in the region about Springfield. My friend went down and found the tall, smooth-shaved lawyer, to whose face, he says, no engravings or DOT traits do justice in it's wonderful and expres- sive power. He was reading Homer's ssIliad, D in translation of course. Lincoln held the book out at arms length after word or two had passed, when he laughed and said: 'FI have made up my mind that have got to read Homer's 'Iliad,'" and the quaint look which has become historial spread over his face. 'You know man might as we'll be out of the world as not read Homer's Iliad.'" It was the summer of the hot campaign between Lincoln and Douglass, and this lawyer politician, whose public reputation was probably as far re- moved from the classics as any man who has reached eminence in our annals, had selected as the book with which he would fill up a gap in his mental education during the inter vais of this hot political debate Homers ''Iliad'
 There is or ought to be somewhere travel worn Shakespeare which deserves to be shrined at Washington. Robert Lincoln-to return to Abraham Lincoln's reading-is fond of saying that his father never travelled without having his copy of Shakespeare packed in box with him. In the odd mo- ments of cases and trials, in desolate court houses in the cheerless rooms of more deso- | late hotels, in the dirt and discomfort of railroad traveling-and few of us know what railroad travelling was on the long stretches of Illinois roads thirty years ago Abraham Lincoln read and reread this worn copy of Shakespeare, committing great stretches of it to memory, until, as most men know, he was able to match the average acquaintance of most actors with greater | passages of the great plays. Judge Kelley | took one of the actors of the day, John Nc | Cullough think it was, during the war to see Lincoln, and was amazed to find the President as familiar with the poet as was | the actor. It is of still more interest, in connection with Mr. Wilson Barrett's theory l of Hamlet" that Abraham Lincoln once | asked Hackett, whose ''Falstaff' was the de- | light of an earlier day: "Why do you ac-
 tors always play Hamlet as an irresolute, va cillating, vague, middle aged sort of a mans" stBecause he was," said MT. Haekett, with the acute certainty of the actor But he was not" said Lincoln; Che was young, inn petuous. full of action, prompt. He is all
 ways doing something. The play is full of
 it and he ought to be played as young man. :" l I was privileged the other day to hear | Walt Whitman express his opinion oi these
 conflicting theories of Hamlet" "ls not
 that" said the old man in the slow, ponder ous, hesitating tone in which he often pauses for word, but never stops for an idea; ''ls
 not that the mystery, the wonder, the fun of it, as the slang word would have it, that
 Hamlet combines both those phases, the un-
 coutrollable impulse, aggressive tempera- ment, and at the same time the meditatlve,
 philosophic, anxious, hesitating man? Is not this the interest of the character which
 has caused it to be overlaid with great aeeu-
 mulati which have hidden the poets real
 purpose-if he had onea'